SSRI-Induced Aphantasia?

May 14, 20211 min readBylimax 17690

So it’s been around a year since I started taking Lexapro for depression. I do not have aphantasia. When I first went on the drug I found that it became harder for me to visualize simple things like what an outfit would look like on me or what food I wanted for dinner. It was harder to imagine the taste or smell of the food and it was very frustrating because I relied on that to choose my meals. I still have trouble making decisions but have accepted it as part of my life now with a more dulled down imagination. I can still picture things like before, but I have to spend much longer concentrating on it. Has anyone else experienced this? I wish I knew of a link between antidepressants and the impact they may have on visualization.

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Chelsea Desaulnier•recently

Wow, I have!! Only I have a slightly different experience. 2 weeks ago I learned that I have aphantasia as well as no internal monologue. I am blind and deaf in my mind. I never even considered it, even when not having an internal monolgue went viral. Surely I heard things in my mind, I never considered the visual. I am still not sure what other senses I am supposed to be sensing in my mind but I think that all I can perceive is feeling emotions. Once I realized this, I also realized that much of my issues surrounding my mental health, anxiety in particular was (in part) due to me not being able to fully process thoughts in my mind. Once I start writing (which is something I have never done until recently) I can easily process complex thoughts. I honestly don’t know how I survived 37 years without processing a thought to completion. Barely, that's how. I have been going through a years long journey into recovering from a mental health break down. I am just finding out that I have ADHD and Autism, Aspergers type and complex PTSD, maybe more stuff too. At the start of this journey I was given the SSRI, esitalopram sp?. I had tried 2 or 3 of them about 17 years ago and I remember saying that they made my mind foggy. The Doctor was frustrated with me, claiming that that doesn't happen with them and pretty much dismissed me. This time around I agreed to give the ssri another round. I took it exactly as prescribed for the amount of time I was supposed to to notice a difference, and then some. Same thing, kinda like a brain fog that I couldn't explain. I felt like my brain just wasn't working the way that I know it does. And I knew it made me feel worse. So I abandoned it again. Since then, I have had several doctors and therapists urge me to try another. I won't. Due to the stress of this last year, I have developed really bad sciatica. I am physically disabled with it. I was prescribed Lyrica, as it's supposed to dull nerve pain. It did not. I had just figured out that I had exectutive functioning issues and as such ADHD. It actually used up so much of my limited EFs that I completely forgot where I was while driving to a familiar location and it took some time to remember where I was. Terrifying. It literally almost stopped my ability to have conscious thoughts. I stopped taking it as soon as a safely could. I have been trying (not too hard) to find a study related to what I experienced but haven’t really come up with much. I have discovered some amazing things along the way. I am extremely interested if not desperate to continue this discussions. Thank you for posting this.

Tom Ebeyer•recently

Hi Chelsea, do you remember ever having visual imagery or an internal monologue? The current research suggests that the majority of aphantasics have been aphantasic since birth. Professors Zeman, Pearson and other prominent researchers have stated they believe that congenital aphantasia is a natural variation of the human experience, though much research is to be done before we can say for sure. All that said, there are certainly cases of acquired aphantasia and medications and depression seem to be correlations that need to be researched to determine whether either might be causal.

Tom Ebeyer•recently

There have been a few teens with depression and who are on medication that experienced diminished imagery throughout their later teens. This hasn't been any research published yet, so we'd be hard-pressed to separate correlation from causation at this point, but I am going to speak with the research community to see if any research ion this topic has begun. I'll invite some other community members with similar experience to this discussion, so you can connect with them!